The Peace of God
By Charles Rush
December 14, 2003
Isaiah 9: 2, 6-7
have
two grown children that are commuting to Manhattan,
one of them at home… thank the Lord for employment. And my wife commutes to Elizabeth.
When the alarm goes off at 5:30,
there is a great flurry of activity that includes a loud clock radio in the
background that someone is listening to for a traffic report… "Today is a
gridlock alert in Manhattan"…
Phone calls. "We're taking the train. Pick me up." Since I live with
three women, I get the background whirl of one, two, or three hair dryers
going, people bumping into walls, tossing dirty clothes in the hamper, and
orally thinking out the days 'to do list'. Our environment is not conducive to
finding the peace of the season that our gospel proclaims this morning.
I was at my
cousin's house this week. They just bought a new video camera and were proudly
showing footage of their 5 year old son rehearsing the Christmas pageant in the
important support role as one of the shepherds. They belong to a large church
in Memphis, so the cast of shepherds
was grand in scale. The camera zooms in on their son and you can clearly see a
shepherds crook being lowered on his head, followed by a shove back, a push
from another side, and then some general commotion that evolves into a
controlled riot, ended with by an earnest director threatening the whole group
of shepherds with bodily harm if they don't straighten up while the Angels sing
to the baby Jesus. Truth be told, this is probably pretty close to the actual
birth in Bethlehem.
It reminds
me of one of my favorite country songs from childhood that goes, "Nobody
wants to play rhythm guitar behind Jesus/Everybody wants to be the lead singer
in the band/ It's hard to get a beat on what is divine/ When everybody's
cutting to the head of the line/ I don't think it's turning out quite like he
planned."
I have to
say that over the years, reflecting on the biblical message, the vision of the
promise of peace impresses me more and more. Our biblical word for peace,
Shalom, comes from an ancient Akkadian word 'salaimu' that
means to be 'healthy, whole, complete.' Physically is signals health;
emotionally, it means to be centered- at one with yourself; spiritually it
means to be rounded or complete- to have balance and values that not only allow
you to address the challenges of life with equanimity but also to creatively
shape the world and make people and things around us grow.[1]
Morally, it is when there is a
congruence between your inner disposition and your outer actions- when you are
consistent in integrity. The Greeks had a word for that (galene);
it was the same word they used for the calm sea, when your conscience is calm
and even because you have integrity.[2]
Economically,
it is what follows when your have repaid your debts; interpersonally it is what
follows when you live up to your vows and are faithful and responsible.
Socially, it is the consequence of people in agreement. The Greek word homonia, Paul uses to
describe what the Church looks like when they are in harmony with one another.
Plato used to say that if we are intentional about becoming wise, when we are
in the mature years of our life and have our passions under the rein of mind
and our morals, there settles over us a deep peace, the Greek word is eirene, that is a spiritual equanimity. The great general
and Emperor Marcus Aurelius that this spirit of peace in our mature years is
what enables us to deal with the world falling apart around us that ultimately
prepares us for dealing with our own death.
In the
ancient world, from Homer right on through Greece
and Rome, there was a popular
saying captured in the Latin phrase Si vis
pacem, para bellum. If
you want peace, then prepare for war. That realpolitik
is with us still as common sense.
But in the
bible, peace has two parallels- truth and justice. There is a wonderful Latin
translation of Isa. 32:17 that reads Opus justitiae pax, "Peace is the work of justice". The
deeper peace of the vision of Isaiah that the choir sang about this morning is
not merely the absence of overt conflict. That is détente. The deeper peace of
Shalom is structured by truth and social justice. It looks forward to the
eradication of the very root causes of conflict and friction.
The vision
of Isaiah is not simply a kind of justice that is imposed upon us. It rather
fills the soul of each person and emanates out. There is justice socially
because each person is filled with compassion and meets the needs of those
around them. The simple prayer attributed to St. Francis describes the
spiritual disposition.
"Lord,
make me an instrument of your peace.
Where there is hatred . . . let me sow love
Where there is injury . . . pardon
Where there is doubt . . . faith
Where there is despair . . .hope
Where there is darkness . . . light
Where there is sadness . . .joy
Divine Master,
grant that i may not so much seek
To be consoled . . .as to console
To be understood . . .as to understand,
To be loved . . . as to love
For it is in giving . . .that we receive,
It is in pardoning, that we are pardoned,
It is in dying . . .that we are born to eternal life
The vision
of Isaiah and the vision of St. Francis are focused on others, on fulfilling
the needs of others, completing the whole in this manner.
In Isaiah
11, we are given a depiction of that peaceable kingdom. In it the aggression of
the natural world has been transcended by a divine peace that produces a new
reconciliation and harmony. "The wolf shall lie dwell with the lamb, and
the leopard shall lie down with the baby goat, and the calf and the lion shall
dwell together… The cow and the bear shall feed together; and the lion shall
eat straw like the ox." (Isa. 11:6-7) And then
this lovely image, which many of us have literally seen, "The suckling
child shall play over the hole of the snake". Children have that way about
them that communicates non-aggression that even wild animals sense. I have a
friend who tells a story about one of his kids when they were barely walking.
The child had opened the door of their cabin in New
Hampshire when he wasn't looking. He goes outside,
flips on the light and to his horror sees his son cornering a skunk that was
trapped in the garden fence, trying to pet it. But the skunk just sensed that
there was no threat and just slowly wriggled past the child and out the garden
gate.
That
scripture in Isaiah says, "And a child shall lead them" (Isa. 11:6) The aggression of the natural world that
encourages the 'survival of the fittest' shall be transcended with a spirit of
harmony and tranquility. Of course, this is not a prophecy for the animal
world. It is to be read by humans who live as social Darwinians, deploying violence
to such a regular degree that it almost appears to be constitutive of our very
being. Humans who are capable of a degree of cruelty, torture, and indifference
that makes the aggression of the animal kingdom pale by comparison. In Isaiah's
day, when you went to the capital city of Babylon, the most powerful kingdom of
the world, you were met on either side of the impressive entrance walls, by
marble friezes that depicted the many conquests in battle that the King had
waged in his life time, with graphic illustrations of what happened to
vanquished enemies. If that weren't enough, a series of poles lined the walls
that held impaled war prisoners, criminals, and enemies of the state. The Imperial
power was strictly a celebration of might and conquest. What if that was
transcended by a divine child-like inquisitive playfulness?
Mao Tse Tung once said that "all
power begins at the end of a gun barrel". That sentiment has been echoed
from the mists of history to the present. But what if, Isaiah says, that
instead of coercion, "the Spirit of
the Lord rested upon him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding… the spirit of
knowledge and awe before the wonder of God?" (Isa.
11:2) What if, instead of the authority of overwhelming physical force, our
leaders had moral authority? What if they "judged with righteousness the
plight of the poor?" What if they decided with "equity for the meek
of the earth?" (Isa. 11:4) What if "the
whole earth were full of the vision of the Lord" and "they would not
hurt or destroy anyone in all my holy mountain?" (Isa.
11:9).
When the
writers of the gospel looked back on the life of Jesus and remembered the
prophecies of Isaiah, the called him the 'Prince of Peace' because of his
resemblance to many of the passages that I just read. When they wrote the story
of his birth, they did it in a very clever way. On the one hand, they did it to
lift up the ways that Jesus fulfilled the prophecies of Isaiah and Micah. On
the other hand, they took the broad outlines of a familiar Roman practice of
telling of the birth of a Roman emperor. Even in infancy, these tales
illustrated how the gods blessed the emperor with a destiny to rule and
miraculous powers to conquer and subject others to their will. But in Luke,
when Jesus is born, it is not the powers of conquest or might that are lifted
up. Rather the angels sing, "Glory to God in the highest, and on earth
peace among all people with whom God is pleased." Not just the Romans, not
just the Jews with whom God is pleased… but all people. And it is not rule, but
peace and harmony.
At the
heart of the message that Jesus came to deliver us, is the gospel of peace. It
is not just a footnote, nor an editorial comment in the margins, it is central.
When Jesus sent out his disciples, in the gospel of Luke, they carried no
physical protection, not even a purse or a bag for support. And he tells them,
to each house you enter, say "Peace be upon this house and if a child of
peace lives in that house, your peace shall rest upon them." (Lk. 10:6) When Jesus heals a woman with a wound that
wouldn't stop bleeding, he says to her "Go in peace" (Mk. 5:34; Lk. 8:48) When a woman comes to him seeking
forgiveness for something she had done, he blesses her and says "Go in
peace." (Lk. 7:50)[3] In
the gospel of John, just before he is arrested and will be killed, Jesus speaks
to his disciples, summarizing everything that he wants to tell them. There, he
speaks of the importance of dwelling in love and then he says, "Peace I
leave with you; my peace I give to you, not as the world gives… Let not your
hearts be troubled, neither be afraid." (Jn.
14:26, 27). And after Jesus dies, when the disciples are locked in a room
because they are afraid, Jesus appears amongst them and says, "Peace be
with you. As God has sent me, so send I you." And he breathes his spirit
upon them. (Jn. 20:19-20) And he breathes it upon
you.
I hope for
you this season, a space of that peace. It was one of the beautiful things of
our first winter snow last week that even our great metropolitan city came to a
stop and early on the morning after a long night of snow, everything was calm,
almost no one was on the road, and we all settled in for a long winter's nap.
In this season, filled with so many things, I also hope for you something like
that rest. I hope that you can breath in the spirit of peace. That you can
touch others, as St. Paul
said, with the holy kiss of peace, and that you in your own way can do the
things that make for peace. That is the real gift of Christmas in fact. Amen.
[1] The
information that follows, though merely general in nature, comes from the
excellent reference article on 'Peace' found in The Anchor Bible Dictionary, volume 5, pp. 206 ff.
[2] ibid. p. 207, under Classical Words.
[3] Ibid. p.
208.
© 2003
Charles Rush.
All rights reserved
